Happy New Year folks!

One of the jobs we do here at CMP when not publishing cutting-edge books or innovative websites (can you tell my New Year's resolution is to be a more aggressive promoter?) is translate news stories from Japanese to English. One story Yuko translated recently dealt with literature distributed via the cellphone. Here's a snippet:

Leading publisher Shinchosha Co. is among the first to distribute stories over the cellphone with its 2002 release of "Shincho Keitai Bunko" (Cell Phone Pocket Edition). The publisher's initial plan for the cellphone was to build an online literary magazine that featured new writings. Publishing a literary magazine can be costly, and circulation tends to be limited. The Internet-based cellphone project would solve both these problems.

But other questions persisted. Who would read such small print on the cellphone screen? Would any author contribute his or her work? The cellphone project was launched with very few of these questions answered. Fortunately, with the help of writers interested in digital publishing, the project came to life.

Popular writer Asa Nonami ... contributed "Anata," an original piece. For 210 yen a month, readers have unlimited access to stories. Series are updated every week from Monday through Friday. Subscribers currently number 30,000, 70% of whom are women in their late teens to 30s.

"The great thing about cellphone literature is that one can get a quick reading fix, even while standing," said 36-year-old freelance writer Kayoko Fujino. She now has a separate cellphone just to read from. "Reading Mika Naito's series on the train coming home from work is now an important daily routine," she said.

That's our translation of a Nikkei story that ran over the holidays. This seems like one of those examples of something that works in Japan but would be next to impossible to replicate in the US. Still, the service is bringing more than $50,000 a month to the publisher, based on the numbers in the story. If we could make a tenth of that, we'd do it in a heartbeat.